All Business User Stories

I’ve been educated and inspired recently by the best-selling design classic The Design of Everyday Things by UX guru Don Norman.

I've read a few data-viz books recently. Here are my quick reviews of Alberto Cairo's The Truthful Art, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's Storytelling with Data, and Isabel Meirelles's Design for Information.

In December 2015, we announced support for Tableau Server on Microsoft Azure’s virtual machines. Since that time, we’ve seen a number of customers choose to deploy Tableau across their enterprise through Microsoft Azure.

Tableau products connect to a wide variety of data sources using named connectors as seen below. These connectors are tuned for performance and Tableau capabilities. We continually evolve these connections and add new ones! And we need your help in testing these new connections.

When we were building MyALPO, our internal portal to Tableau Server, we knew we wanted to include a search functionality. But it turns out search is a pretty complicated thing to build. When sat down to build the functionality, we had more questions than direction. We weren’t quite sure how to approach the problem, and we couldn’t find any resources on the web to help guide us.

MyALPO provides a personalized homepage for every user so people can quickly and easily find what they need. With more and more people authoring workbooks and data sources to Tableau Server, this scalable solution has proven immensely valuable to our users. We don’t plan to productionalize MyALPO, but we’d like to share what we learned along the way.

Data is crucial to all areas of the business. And for many of us, our data also includes sensitive information. It’s critical that a business’s revenue and customer details, for example, remain private. When published to the cloud, you need to be assured this type of sensitive data remains secure and private. Protecting the security of our users’ data is a top priority at Tableau. If you're considering—or are already working with—data in the cloud, there are specific questions you need to know are met.

As our company has grown, we’ve seen more and more people publishing workbooks and data sources to Tableau Server, which we’re thrilled to see. But the growth has also posed a challenge. With more people authoring content, it has become increasingly harder for people to quickly find what they need. That’s why we built MyALPO, an internal tool that provides a personalized homepage for every user.

Want to learn the ins and outs of Tableau? We’ve got you covered with a new book.

Today, Microsoft announced the launch of its latest version of its SQL Server product, SQL Server 2016. Microsoft asked us to run some early performance tests on Tableau and the results were pretty impressive, so we thought we’d share a little more detail with you here.

Presenting information in a visual way is not a novel concept. But best practices—such as the use of the x-axis to display a trend over time, for example—were once novel ideas. Rewind to the 18th century, and a combination of creativity, passion, and teamwork led to the birth of the x-axis.

Check out the tips, tricks, and ideas in this roundup of the best of the Tableau web for the month of February.